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Fox News announced Joe Biden would surpass the 270 electoral college votes needed to become president after calling the states of Nevada and Pennsylvania for the Democratic candidate.
The path to Joe Biden’s victory: five days in five minutes – video highlights
US election live: Joe Biden wins and says ‘it’s time for America to unite’ More
When Donald Trump supporters gathered outside a vote-counting centre in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday night, they had a simple and perhaps unexpected chant: “Fox News Sucks!”
Although the channel has become synonymous with Trump’s rise to power, in the last two days Fox News has become the focus of the Trump campaign’s anger after it made an early call on Tuesday night that the state of Arizona was going to Joe Biden.
In the process, the channel switched the media’s attention away from Trump’s substantial success in Florida and undermined the president’s attempts to focus attention on the vote counting in Pennsylvania.
Such was the level of fury within the Trump campaign at the call that his team reportedly attempted to have the decision overturned. According to the New York Times, this involved Jared Kushner contacting Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, while in Vanity Fair’s reporting it was the president himself who called the media mogul. Regardless of who was placing the calls, Fox has stuck by its decision – much to the anger of many of its viewers who have bombarded the channel with complaints.
The decision to call the ultra-close Arizona race for Biden – a victory that was later also declared by the Associated Press, which provides results data to the Guardian – was made by Fox’s Arnon Mishkin, who runs the broadcaster’s decision desk. Before the election, Mishkin, a registered Democrat who has worked for Fox News for decades, had made clear that he would not be swayed by internal pressure in making calls for states.
As a result, Mishkin has been portrayed as a defender of the truth, representing the uneasy balance that exists between Fox’s straight news division and the highly opinionated rightwing hosts who shape the external perception of the channel.
On Thursday, Mishkin, who has become a target for angry Trump supporters, told the channel’s viewers that he would not be changing his mind on the basis that “we strongly believe that our call will stand, and that’s why we’re not pulling back the call”.
Dismissing claims from Trump’s team that they could still edge ahead in the ultra-close race as more votes were counted, a visibly exasperated Mishkin pushed back and said the objections were like talking about what would happen “if a frog had wings”.
“We’re confident that the data will basically look like the data we’ve noticed throughout the count in Arizona,” he said.
Trump and his team have an increasingly complicated relationship with Fox News. Throughout his presidency he has been an obsessive watcher of the channel, often providing commentary on his Twitter feed about its audience ratings when he objects to its coverage and phoning in to dispute specific issues.
On the day of the election he complained on air about the channel’s coverage not being sufficiently supportive: “Somebody said what’s the difference between this and four years ago, and I say Fox … In the old days you wouldn’t put ‘Sleepy Joe’ on every time he opens his mouth. You had Democrats on more than you had Republicans. I’m not complaining. I’m just telling people.”
One of the bigger questions in US rightwing media is what happens if Trump loses the election, with longstanding speculation that he could be tempted to start his own media outlet in a bid to communicate directly with his supporters. More
“This is why elections are fun,” said CNN’s John King, relentlessly jabbing at one of his two giant iPads as the lead in Florida lurched back and forth. Then he said it again. Absolutely no one agreed with him.About an hour and an epoch earlier, the networks and news channels had seemed as interested in their own redemption story as they were in the election itself. They hoped for a do-over of 2016, where every glib presumption would be replaced with a cautionary note, and a radical plan to wait, no matter how long it took, to see what would actually happen.That was temporarily good for democracy, but possibly difficult for television executives, whose solemn duty was to make their product as opaque as reality. “There is no telling when we are going to have a winner,” said Martha MacCallum, introducing Fox’s coverage with something other than a bang. “It could be hours, it could be days, it could possibly take even weeks.” On MSNBC, Brian Williams told viewers: “It’s going to be a night of a lot of math.” It wasn’t a thrilling observation, but it was at least unlikely to be clipped up and played on Twitter’s infinite loop in the days ahead.Of course, there was still the odd hostage to fortune. “Biden is doing much better with white voters, and I think that’s going to be a theme throughout this night,” said David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser, and you wondered if that would ultimately seem too obvious to remember or too idiotic to forget. In those moments, as the words left their mouths, the pundit class seemed like tightrope walkers: foolhardy or brave, one foot in front of another, the weight of history on their backs.Then the numbers came in, and the math went out of the window – or maybe just got more complicated. NBC’s Chuck Todd, swooshing around his own magic map, remarked: “All that tells me is, it’s going to take forever to call Florida.” Twenty minutes later, he said that the state “looked like an uphill climb for Joe Biden”. Half an hour after that, it was firmly in the Trump column.CNN’s entire broadcast, meanwhile, had become brutally compelling, appearing to jettison its ensemble of sedate anchors in favour of King’s one-man dramatic monologue on the Florida county of Miami-Dade. But, other than King’s unusual sense of what constitutes a good time, it wasn’t clear why it was still treating Florida like a toss-up.On the BBC, Andrew Neil and Katty Kay were formidable and austere, with Neil signing off from his perch at the corporation in a mood of magnificent irritation with America for not having made its mind up yet. The static cameras and distinct shortage of pounding theme music set them apart from their excitable US counterparts, which were increasingly difficult to distinguish from each other.CBS had a “what happens if” map; MSNBC had a “what if” map. Every studio adhered to an aesthetic of fluorescent Tetris. Countdown clocks and “key race alerts” with no outcome attached dragged viewers remorselessly from hour to hour. The phrase “blue wall” became ubiquitous, again.At some point , John King’s touchscreen stopped working. “You’re gonna have to come back to me,” he said. Meanwhile, the New York Times’ notorious election needles had swung firmly in Trump’s favour, and the prospect of days more trauma to come.Then one of them swung back again, and Fox News called Arizona for Biden ahead of anybody else. Karl Rove, who when Fox put Ohio in Obama’s column in 2012 had vocally disagreed on air with the station’s decision desk, vocally disagreed on air with the station’s decision desk.The only person who seemed certain of anything was the president himself.Trump tweeted that the Democrats “are trying to STEAL the election” and claimed that “Votes cannot be cast after the Poles are closed!” CNN’s Jake Tapper said that “the fact that the president misspelled ‘polls’ is just ‘chef’s kiss’”, which drew the kind of social media enthusiasm on the left that you might a few hours earlier have imagined would be reserved for a victory in Texas.Instead, the naive prospect of euphoria had been replaced with the desperate urge to stave off despair. In another time, those who found themselves unable to switch off might at least have hoped to absorb their anxiety with a few fellow travellers, and a drinking game or two. This year, the stakes are too vast, the lockdowns too dislocating. Instead, they sat in their bubbles, waiting – and waiting – for the future to burst through.Fun? Trump called it fraud. “We gotta dip in here because there have been several statements that are just frankly not true,” said the NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie, to her and the network’s eternal credit, even as rivals let him lie without interruption. On the BBC, a few hours earlier, the political scientist Larry Sabato had made a more plausible assessment.“We are very, very split,” he said. “This night has just begun.” More
The big difference between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections is that this time, mainstream media outlets are mostly not taking the bait on a dubiously sourced set of digital materials associated with the Democratic candidate.Outside the rightwing bubble, the exceptions are disproportionately connected with Australia: Australian writers, Australian outlets, and/or outlets associated with News Corporation, who, like its founder, has Australian origins.The New York Post, a News Corp tabloid, has been leading the pursuit of the story of a data cache which is purportedly a copy of the hard drive of a computer belonging to Hunter Biden. They’ve not had much support from other established newspapers, but News Corp’s Fox News and a flotilla of lesser conservative media outlets have been dutifully amplifying and even adding their own touches to the tale.On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on Wednesday night US time, for example, the host implied that documents associated with the story, which his editorial team had shipped across the country, may have been stolen by people trying to shut down reporting on the cache.The Daily Beast reported on Thursday, however, that freight company UPS had simply misdirected the package, which has been recovered.The original New York Post Biden piece had huge problems on arrival, so much so that a journalist there reportedly refused to add their byline to it.The chain of custody was one of the issues. The data supposedly came from a computer, dropped off by an unidentified person, who was presumed but not positively determined to be Hunter Biden by the owner of a computer store in Delaware.That man’s story of how he retrieved the data from the machine and how he came to give it to the authorities and Rudy Giuliani has shifted. The FBI subpoenaed a computer from the store, which is reportedly connected to a money-laundering investigation, but it’s impossible to compare that machine with the supposed copy.Anyone who reports on leaked digital materials, as I have, knows that it is trivially easy to fake, modify, subtract from or add to, and otherwise mess around with any documents in any cache. Some documents carry indelible marks, such as any emails that are signed with DKIM security signatures, but everything else can be messed with.In this case, we haven’t seen the originals, just PDF printouts, and the New York Post has not been forthcoming with any detailed or satisfactory account of its own authentication process. It hasn’t said how it determined the authenticity of the cache as a whole, or individual items it has reported on, and has continued handwaving about the FBI subpoena, and the lack of denials from the Biden camp.If it does know for sure that the material is a genuine copy of Biden’s laptop, it isn’t letting on how. At least some of the material appears to be authentic. A sex tape released last week, for example, appears to really feature Hunter Biden. But that doesn’t mean that Giuliani has it because Hunter Biden took all that data to the computer shop. We still don’t really know who put them together, how, and for what purpose.This explains the queasiness of most mainstream outlets – of whom Giuliani told the New York Times that “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” The Wall Street Journal and Fox News were both reportedly offered elements of the story, and each refused.(One of Fox’s news anchors, Chris Wallace, commented that “I can understand the concern about this story. It is completely unverified and frankly, Rudy Giuliani is not the most reliable source anymore. I hate to say that, but it’s just true.”)None of this appears to have been a concern for the leadership at the New York Post, which once again now includes Col Allan, its Australian-born one-time editor in chief, and an outspoken Trump supporter. Allan retired in 2016 but is now back there as a special adviser, and was reportedly leading the charge to publish the material quickly.Once they pushed it out, Fox News started running with the pack that the Post had whistled up.So too, at crucial moments, did Australia’s News Corp outlets. On Sunday 18 October, Sharri Markson hosted Steve Bannon on her Sunday evening program. Bannon crowed about an email from Hunter Biden’s lawyer which supposedly showed him asking for the computer back.Bannon told Markson that the lawyer called the shop owner, “and when the guy said I can’t remember, I’m going back to my shop, he sent a couple of emails in a panic saying ‘I’ve got to get my hands on this right away’”.That email was subsequently released by a Fox reporter, and merely contained a request that the proprietor “review your records” on the matter. The lawyer, meanwhile, is on record saying that the Bidens “have no idea” where the email came from.Markson’s show, like most of Sky’s fare, is not widely watched. But she’s willing to have Bannon on. One might say that he couldn’t get arrested in the US, except that he recently was, and charged with fraud in connection with a border wall crowdfunding scheme, aboard the mega-yacht of his reported employer, Guo Wengui, whose bitter fight with the Chinese government has driven him into exile.Giuliani’s material was good enough for News Corp’s post; Bannon’s record apparently posed no concerns to News Corp’s Markson. News Corp’s Australian commentariat, and expatriate New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, have all assisted in pushing the story, and pushing back on criticism.While most media outlets had a reckoning after 2016, it didn’t extend to crucial parts of News Corporation, including the most prominent faces of its Australian operation. More
The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been mocked for his attempt to explain why he could not produce some documents he had promised relating to Joe Biden.He said the only copy of the papers, which he claimed added to claims about Biden’s son Hunter, had been lost.In a segment delivered to camera, Carlson said:
On Monday we received from a source a collection of confidential documents related to the Biden family. We believe those documents are authentic, they’re real, and they’re damning … We texted a producer in New York and we asked him to send those documents to us in LA … He shipped those documents overnight to California with a large national carrier brand … But the Biden documents never arrived in Los Angeles. Tuesday morning we received word from the shipping company that our package had been opened and the contents were missing. The documents had disappeared.
He went on to say of the delivery company, which he did not name:
They searched the plane and the trucks that carried it, they went through the office in New York where our producer dropped that package off, they combed their entire cavernous sorting facility. They used pictures of what we had sent so that searchers would know what to look for. They went far and beyond. But they found nothing, those documents have vanished. As of tonight the company has no idea – and no working theory even – about what happened to this trove of materials, documents that are directly relevant to the presidential campaign.
Carlson’s show has been one of the main conduits of conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden, attempting to expand the narrative about his dealings in Ukraine and China and castigating other media outlets for not paying enough attention to claims made recently in the New York Post.Carson’s story of the lost documents cut little ice on social media:BREAKING: Documents Tucker Carlson never actually had that would allegedly blow up the election were so important that they were sent via DHL, and now can’t be found despite copiers, iPhone cameras and security cameras. 😂😂😂 https://t.co/9yKkDAUh2v— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) October 29, 2020 More
A former Republican congressman has blamed Rupert Murdoch’s media outlets for fuelling “climate rejectionism” among conservatives, suggesting they could be part of the reason why the United States is failing to lead the world to tackle global heating.Bob Inglis, a former South Carolina congressman who has renounced his previous climate denialism and now leads a group seeking to rally conservatives to act, questioned the role of News Corp and Fox Corporation during an event hosted by the Australia Institute.Inglis told the progressive thinktank that Australia and the US shared a form of “climate rejectionism that comes in conservative clothing”.He said both countries also shared “a particular news organisation that has a great deal to do with that” – and pointed the finger at Murdoch’s Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in particular.“If you look at Fox viewers in America – that’s where you find the climate disputation,” Inglis said.Inglis said his group, RepublicEn, which campaigns for conservative leadership on climate action, believed that a change in the way the issue was covered by those outlets would be “the holy grail” in unlocking greater ambition in US policy.“If Fox would just change or if the Wall Street Journal editorial page would just change – either one of those and this would be finished, we’d be done with climate, we’d be acting,” he said. “It really is that important – so if anybody can get to the Murdochs please let me know.”Business leader and former Sydney lord mayor Lucy Turnbull also sheeted home some responsibility to large media businesses such as News Corp during the same webinar event on Wednesday.Turnbull’s husband, the former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, was ousted as leader of the centre-right Liberal party in 2009, and again in 2018, in part because of internal battles over climate policy.“There are a lot of people who have a huge level of conviction about the fact that climate change is with us, that we have to act,” she said. “The problem is that the polarisation makes it hard to do that because you have the people [who believe] that it isn’t a problem despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is.”In a clear reference to News Corp, Turnbull added: “They have a very loud voice in a lot of political debate aided by very large media organisations, especially one which crosses both the US and Australia and other countries besides.”She said this had resulted in a “fragmented, deeply polarised conversation”, which could be a symptom of the fragmentation of politics around the world.The comments come as another former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, campaigns for a royal commission to be launched into the Murdoch empire in Australia.The petition, launched on the Australian parliament’s website on Saturday, has so far attracted more than 236,000 signatures.The focus on the company comes after Rupert Murdoch’s youngest son, James Murdoch, said one of the reasons he had stepped away from his father’s media empire was because it legitimised disinformation and sowed doubts about facts.He told the New York Times climate change and coronavirus were both public health crises and “political spin” should not get “in the way of delivering crucial public health information”.James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn, also issued a joint statement in January – midway through Australia’s summer bushfire crisis – to say they were “particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia given obvious evidence to the contrary”.Last year, however, Rupert Murdoch told shareholders “there are no climate change deniers” around his company and said his business was early to commit to “science-based targets to limit climate change” and was working to reduce its climate emissions.Inglis and Turnbull discussed media coverage as part of the wide-ranging webinar on Wednesday, which also canvassed the forthcoming US presidential election.Inglis contended that Republicans would undergo a “reappraisal” of their position on climate policy in coming years, although that reassessment would come faster if Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump for the presidency. Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate accord is due to take effect the day after the November election.Inglis, who previously visited Australia in 2017 as a guest of the Australia Institute, recounted how he had once insisted that climate change was “nonsense”.“I didn’t know anything about it except that Al Gore was for it and, in as much as I represented probably one of the most conservative districts in America, that was the end of the inquiry,” he said.But Inglis said he had a “three-step metamorphosis”, based on his children pressing him to take environmental issues seriously, his own visit to Antarctica to see ice core drilling evidence and his snorkelling trip to the Great Barrier Reef.He spoke of the importance of bridging divides, saying he was grateful to have been “extended grace by people who knew it was real before I did”.Inglis urged people on the left of politics to accept new entrants to the conversation “without saying you’re the dumb kid in the class, the last one to get it” because “if you welcome them in we can solve this thing”. More
US elections 2020
Chris Wallace says he didn’t realise president’s approach would be to hector throughout More
US elections 2020
Fox News host blamed for failing to control debate stage as president spends evening talking over others
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1:41
US presidential debate moderator Chris Wallace struggles to contain Trump – video
The Fox News host Chris Wallace faced much criticism as he struggled to referee the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on Tuesday night.
For most of the event, Trump talked over Biden and Wallace failed to keep the president patient for his chance to talk. At a few other moments, the Democratic challenger’s scowls and snickering at the president interrupted Trump’s comments.
Many viewers blamed Wallace, though it was Trump who most often broke the agreed rules of the debate, refused to stick to his own speaking time, and steamrollered over both other men.
“That was a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck,” said CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, Jake Tapper. “That was the worst debate I have ever seen. In fact, it wasn’t even a debate. It was a disgrace, and it’s primarily because of President Trump.”
“That was the worst presidential debate I have ever seen in my life,” said ABC political anchor George Stephanopoulos.
The former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill tweeted: “Chris Wallace is embarrassing, and trying to pretend that the problem isn’t 100% Trump.”
Claire McCaskill
(@clairecmc)
Chris Wallace is embarrassing, and trying to pretend that the problem isn’t 100% Trump.
September 30, 2020
Again and again as Trump interrupted Biden, Wallace could be heard in the background saying “Mr President, Mr President”, trying to get Trump to wait his turn.
Ben Rhodes, a political commentator and former deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama, tweeted: “Chris Wallace just disappearing.”
Ben Rhodes
(@brhodes)
Chris Wallace just disappearing
September 30, 2020
Ana Navarro-Cárdenas
(@ananavarro)
Oh my God.Chris Wallace has totally lost control of this thing. He’s allowing Trump to behave like schoolyard bully, completely disrespecting the millions of Americans who tuned-in hoping to see a debate of ideas, and a plan to move America forward.
September 30, 2020
The New York magazine business journalist Josh Barro tweeted: “People are hating on Chris Wallace but I think there was no way to moderate this debate effectively.”
Josh Barro
(@jbarro)
People are hating on Chris Wallace but I think there was no way to moderate this debate effectively.
September 30, 2020
Carl Bernstein
(@carlbernstein)
Chris Wallace needs to shut trump down and insist he follow rules…and , as moderator, enforce them…stop the debate for 60 secs and lay down the rules.
September 30, 2020
Debate moderators often get either high marks or low marks from viewers, conservative and liberal, during presidential debates. It’s rarer to see bipartisan agreement that a moderator lost control. That was the emerging opinion coming out of the first debate, as conservative commentators criticised Wallace for not challenging Biden on some of his attacks on Trump.
Biden seemed to get frustrated with Wallace’s failing attempts to rein in Trump when it was his turn to talk.
“It’s hard to get a word in with this clown,” Biden said.
Wallace himself seemed aware that he didn’t have total command over the debate. After an extended speech by Trump, Biden said: “I can’t remember everything he was ranting about.”
Wallace responded: “I’m having trouble myself.”
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6:22
Biden and Trump trade insults in frenzied presidential debate – video highlights
Topics
US elections 2020
Donald Trump
Joe Biden
Fox News
TV news
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